TagAuthentication

February 12, 2016

Ask Laura: Confused about Authentication

By laura

3 Min read

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12February

Dear Laura, I have a client moving from an external ESP to an internal system. They send approximately eight million messages per year, and these are primarily survey emails on behalf of their clients. We’ve had some conversations about authentication, and I’m trying to help them figure out if they just need DMARC or if they also need DKIM and SPF. It seems some ISPs prefer different methods, and...

January 20, 2016

What to expect in 2016

By laura

5 Min read

19 comments

20January

I don’t always do predictions posts, even though they’re  popular. Most years I skip them because I don’t see major changes in the email space. And, I’m not the type to just write a prediction post just to post a prediction. This year, though, I do see changes for everyone in the email space. Most of them center on finally having to deal with the technical debt that’s been accumulating over the...

October 12, 2015

Confusing the engineers

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

12October

We went camping last weekend with a bunch of friends. Had a great time relaxing on the banks of the Tuolumne River, eating way too much and visiting. On Saturday I was wearing a somewhat geeky t-shirt. It said 554: abort mission. (Thank you MessageSystems). At some point on Saturday every engineer came up to me, read my shirt and then looked at me and said “That’s not HTTP.”...

October 7, 2015

IPv6 and authentication

By steve

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07October

I just saw a post over on the mailop mailing list where someone had been bitten by some of the IPv6 email issues I discussed a couple of months ago. They have dual-stack smarthosts – meaning that their smarthosts have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and will choose one or the other to send mail over. Some domains they send to use Office 365 and opted-in to receiving mail over IPv6, so their...

September 14, 2015

The holiday mailing season

By laura

7 Min read

2 comments

14September

We’re half way through September and it seems way too early to start thinking about the holidays. But for marketers, even email marketers, planning should be starting now. This planning shouldn’t just be about content and targeting and segmentation, but should also cover deliverability. Most retailers use email marketing to drive traffic to their websites during the holidays. Experian...

August 24, 2015

Check your tech

By laura

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24August

One of the things we do for just about every new client coming into WttW is have them send us an email from their bulk mail system. We then check it for technical correctness. This includes things like reviewing all the different From headers, rDNS of the connecting IP, List-Unsubscribe headers and authentication. This is always useful, IMO, because we often find things that were right when they...

May 15, 2015

DMARC=BestGuessPass

By josh

2 Min read

1 comment

15May

Looking at the headers within the mail received with my Office365 domain I see dmarc=bestguesspass.  BestGuessPass?  That’s a new. A few days after seeing dmarc=bestguesspass, Terry Zink at Microsoft posted an explanation. Exchange Online Protection, the filtering system for Office365, is analyzing the authentication of incoming emails and if the domain is not publishing a DMARC record, EOP...

May 5, 2015

Four things to check before your next mailing

By laura

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05May

Like many bits of technology, email is often set-and-forget. Everything is checked and rechecked during setup, and then no one goes back and looks at it again. But mail programs are not static, and people make changes. These changes don’t really break things, but over time they can create their own set of problems. Setting aside some time every quarter or even every year to check and make...

May 4, 2015

April 2015: The Month in Email

By laura

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04May

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month: Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from...

April 22, 2015

Authentication and Repudiation

By steve

1 Min read

2 comments

22April

Email Authentication lets you demonstrate that you sent a particular email. Email Repudiation is a claim that you didn’t send a particular email.   SPF is only for email authentication1 DKIM is only for email authentication DMARC is only for email repudiation   1 SPF was originally intended to provide repudiation, but it didn’t work reliably enough to be useful. Nobody uses...